coming up this hour on r t can you hear me now while the government sure can the u.s. justice department is defending its use of warrantless tracking of cell phones and it isn't the only one a look at your mobile right coming up. plus it's one small step for the obama administration one big leap back for human rights advocates a law that allows indefinite military detention of american citizens was up held in court the details ahead. and could there be a get motu point tucked neatly into the northern illinois landscape a massive correctional facility that the federal bureau of prisons has its eye on ahead we'll ask if the obama administration plans to transfer one hundred moment

they inmates into this facility. it's wednesday october third five pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you're watching our t.v. . well as many of you know we like to keep you updated on the latest methods of surveillance the government is taking sensitive topic a whole lot of other media outlets don't bother to discuss it all well there are a couple new developments out there first the u.s. justice department argued in court yesterday that authorities should be able to get their hands on minute by minute movements of cell phone users over a sixty day period without having to ask a judge to approve a warrant second out of concern for such actions like this for new state legislature passed a bill stating that law enforcement agents and other government entities be required to obtain a valid search warrant in order to access locations specific information submitted

or received by electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets and here's what happened to that bill california governor jerry brown a democrat returned it he said to the members of the california senate i am returning senate bill fourteen thirty four without my signature this bill would require a search warrant before law enforcement officers can obtain location information generated by a cell phone tablet computer automobile navigation system or other electronic device it may be that legislative action is needed to keep the law current in our rapidly evolving electronic age but i am not convinced that the bill strikes the right balance between the operational needs of law enforcement and individual expectations of privacy sincerely edmund g. brown well declan mccullagh is the chief political correspondent for c.n.n. and joins me now from san francisco declan i know you've sort of written about these things let's start with what happened yesterday you covered this you wrote

that the obama administration would tell federal judges in new orleans that warrantless tracking of the location of americans mobile devices is perfectly legal how did everything play out. well i've been listening to the audio i wasn't there for the oral arguments unfortunately i was up online and the and the judges seemed like they didn't really understand the technology that well but they understand the procedure and the principles pretty well so i suspect that they're going to take a pretty critical view of the government's arguments in this case it's too early to know i will have a decision in a few months i know that when you wrote that records kept by wireless carriers can hint at or reveal things like medical treatments political associations religious convictions even whether someone's cheating on his or her spouse or talk a little bit about you know privacy aspects of what is being sort of brought up and discussed in court. well marketers love cell phone location information act

makers people making iowa for android apps do men the government does as well ah because you keep this is a device that you keep with you if you're like a lot of people all the time millions of people to carry in their pockets or or purses and so if and whenever it's in the use even if it turns on not making a telephone call it's talking to the cell phone network so it can route calls properly so if you look back at the logs they're very detail and they show minute by minute hour by hour movements over a long period of time and so you can stitched together what someone's doing and if you have access to these logs and you mention you know marketers loving you know mobile devices yes i'm definitely on as i've got my i phone and sometimes i like to ask siri you know hey sarah i'm in the mood for italian work i go there or is there sushi where i am and you know she figures out where i am and you know give me back the responses always give me good recommendations but i think what

a lot of people don't understand is that it's not just about you know googling you know where the nearest department store or restaurant is it's not about talking to siri that marketers are not like there's so much but that the government does have the ability to see where people are. anytime right and. listeria knows where you are that means apple servers probably somewhere in cupertino california know where you are and that means that the government can figure out where you are as well if they had access to those servers and so look i mean nobody's saying that even the a.c.l.u. the electronic frontier foundation the civil liberties groups that are part of this case there are things that we should never have access to is that the issue here is under what circumstances they can have access to this location information and the groups are saying well we have a fourth amendment to the u.s. constitution it says get a search warrant go to a judge demonstrate a will cause that this is hundreds of years old this language is from. the bill of rights then acted over two hundred years ago you know how to do it just do that and

then you can get the data and the government has said it's both the bush and obama thing it's bipartisan under under the d.o.j. that too that's too high a burden it'll make investigations more difficult we want to be able to get it by without having to go through the warrant process. yeah i mean where is the get it is the warren process that is difficult i mean obviously if there's you know a kidnapped child or a missing person that getting a warrant should be pretty easy and pretty fast right and in reality you know you have exemptions for emergency this disclosure means doesn't exist like forty eight hours and if you are going to have a warrant if there is a few places in danger facebook is going to turn over the data. using internal data without a word we're talking about non them emergency non-life threatening routine investigations and a few days as we've just want to be able to argue with relevance what investigation as opposed to probable cause the something that the factually more privacy protective and so this is also what the federal legislation is proposing there's

been a bunch of bills introduced most recently last week by representative last britain who represent the democrats represent the districts in some valley that had orders to bunch of these companies including google and she says that the bill says it hasn't gone anywhere yet but it says that search warrant for location data was talking about what went down in california the governor are siding in this case with law enforcement over privacy issues. i was asking you this before but i mean. is it that difficult for law enforcement to get a warrant and talk a little bit about california and what this means. well the this at the risk of sounding but legally speaking the standard is whether whether you can demonstrate probable cause before a judge other verses which is a relatively high standard for privacy protected versus just relevance with ongoing criminal investigation you know a lot of stuff is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and we seen over

time that broad surveillance powers can be abused the department justice inspector general with a bunch of reports but look moving on to california what happened is that the a.c.l.u. and some other privacy groups wrote a bill that really wasn't worded that well i don't like the idea behind the bill you are going but actually wasn't just one for some that objected it was also the cellular industry wrote an article for c. net in june i think it was saying here the objections they're raising it just didn't it didn't understand the technology well enough so i think with a combination of industry in law enforcement opposition that persuaded governor brown to say better luck next time so what are the the objections by some of these mobile carriers why would they object to this language they think it's poorly written mentally imo this is i have to go back to my article four months ago but i think they were things like civil penalties they didn't like those the emergency exemptions thing that they weren't broad enough to actually but can respond in the

case of emergencies so it's i don't i think the brown can be convinced to sign a bill but this was kind of moving quickly and it didn't have it didn't have the legislative record that you probably want so next time better luck next time it's interesting to me that when how much of this is unsettled at this point i mean i know that a scene that disclosed the justice department warrantless tracking requests from back in two thousand and five why seven years later are there still not clear lines drawn here. well in part i mean and in fact was my article thanks for mentioning it that was the first to disclose this this is this was of the say seven years ago it was over seven years ago now it's a combination of a few factors the first is that seven years ago this is pre i phone right this is before people relied on those these devices as much as they do now that it's not just cell phones we're talking about is also they've got an android pad or not

kindle depending on the model or an i pad three g. or something that's the fucking that there is a network that this can be tracked as well so the combination of technology has advanced and so relatively recently and congress is kind of slow moving at one long foresman and including the department just says no this is going to hinder criminal investigations well we saw this in the one nine hundred ninety s. during the encryption wars i'm going to call out a bot by this one again yes real briefly back and lay out for me some of the top one or two arguments by you know organizations like the a.c.l.u. in terms of why stop right now they have a technological argument which is that this is a vast amount of data one order can get i didn't get it and i would govern to get megabytes gigabytes of it in a second is the constitutional argument the fourth amendment protects americans privacy including your location privacy as a supreme court decision dealing with g.p.s. physical tracking bugs earlier this year that they think is relevant all right

pretty interesting stuff here declan mccullagh chief political correspondent for the net thanks for weighing in. i was going with the latest ruling on the national defense authorization act or n.d.a. a federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the u.s. government can for now indefinitely detain anyone as most of you know this is a case we've been following very closely since it was signed on new year's eve after president obama said he wouldn't sign it yesterday's ruling affectively overturns the ruling by u.s. district court judge katherine forest to permanently block the controversial per provisions in the n.d.a. on the grounds that they violated both protections given by the first amendment and also by due process rights a few months ago i sat down with one of the plaintiffs in the case hedges the obama here's chris hedges breaking down the two sections of the n.d.a. that the lawsuit focuses on section ten twenty one and ten twenty two which in essence allows the executive branch to strip an american citizen of their

constitutional rights to due process and to hold them in military facilities that's what we're question a very very tiny part of the bill which i think you know you don't have to be a legal scholar to determine is clearly unconstitutional i mean the agreed just violation of constitutional rights is really you know undeniable well to break down exactly what yesterday's ruling means for the n.d.a. for journalists and for the country itself i was joined by carl mayer attorney for the mayer law group. it's thanks for having me on the the import of this ruling is more procedural one than anything else this is an appeals court the second circuit court of appeals in manhattan and they ruled to put a stay on judge force permanent injunction but it's only a state pending appeal meaning that the second circuit is going to hear the merits of this case and whether this law the n.c.a.a. is unconstitutional and they'll hear it on an expedited basis which was part of

their order yesterday which was i think a victory for our side because these appeals can take a year or two years sometimes but they set a briefing schedule that will allow them to rule on this probably within the next three to four months and at the end of the year beginning of next year it was not a victory to have them put a stay on and we thought that they made a mistake because by staying judge for this very carefully crafted order we think they're not giving. due regard to americans first amendment rights free speech rights and equal protection rights and let me know what they're doing i want to say let me go through just for our viewers who haven't read this i want to go through some of the reasons listed listed excuse me for the stay first the government clarifies unequivocally that journalists and activists are in no danger of being detained by the u.s. military the factor does not affect the existing rights of u.s. citizens or others arrested in the u.s. it also says the language on the injunction appears to go beyond and itself to

limit the government's authority under the authorization for the use of military force some talk a little bit about these reasons given by this three judge panel for why this stay was ok and necessary sure and again this was only a. two page order a second circuit has not considered this on the merits they simply issued a procedural stay to probably be a panel of a completely different judge. they will hear the merits of this case but as to the reasons the first reason that they say is that the plaintiffs themselves according to the government are in no danger detention what judge forrest addressed that in her opinion both and she said frankly the government when it was asked on the record can you were assured these plaintiffs that they were journalists and activists that they will not be detained under the n.d.a. they will not be put in military prisons the government councilors government

lawyers repeatedly said we cannot offer those assurances we cannot offer those assurances and that was the only evidence that the government put in their case the government later shifted in their briefs in the briefs that they put into the second circuit and in those briefs they said the plaintiffs are in no danger of being incarcerated by the military but that's better constitute evidence in a court of law and we can't believe the government's position and judge for yourself noted her opinion that the government had switched their position a couple of times in front of her they tried to hedge and say maybe some of the places you're subject to detention some aren't so that reason we don't agree with and that's what we are doing in our papers before the second circuit when they hear this appeal shortly. this is the second acted under the n.b.a. by the language the n.b.a. judge force also addressed that in her opinion is that the n.b.a. doesn't say anything of the kind it just says the existing law applies and part of the problem is that there's no reference to what existing law means and it has to

be clarified and that's what judge for yesterday's permanent stay was issued as you mentioned three judge panel the u.s. court of the correction is aggressive is not a permanent state it's a state pending an appeal a lot of what i was when i was reading that it was calling it a permanent state but that the stay pending the appeal and it was an issue by the three judge panel one of those judges granted an emergency stay a couple of weeks ago i guess i want to know from you are a little bit about the timing i mean what is the emergency here. well the from our perspective the emergency is it any point in time as long as there is this day and as long as the n.d.a. is in effect at any point in time our point this or any other journalist or activists could be taken to a military prison and detained without counsel and without right to a trial by jury at any any time of the day or night that's that's the emergency that we have and we fake it violates the first amendment and since men united states constitution the government is saying that they're there emergency is that

they are repeated the president is impeded and cannot conduct the war effort as long as judge force orders in place and the n.b.a. doesn't exist we say that's nonsense because the president of all sorts of powers at his disposal to go after terrorists statute after statute after statute regulation after regulation after regulation that been passed in implemented since nine eleven so the government has yet to make its case in any evidence they haven't put into one witness not one document not one scrap of evidence just their briefs that that's all they've put it to show why they need this emergency stay and we don't agree with it and i know one of the biggest problems the plaintiffs say they have is the nebulous language judge force called it unconstitutionally vague we're talking about the targeting of people who quote a substantially support terrorist or associated forces chris hedges for example

argues he could be a target because he's interviewing some alleged terrorists as part of his job why can't these provisions just be removed. well that is another option and we hope that during the pendency of this appeal this appeal that the congress will come to their senses and honor the constitution under the first first move principles of free speech the fifth member principle due process and repeal these provisions of the n.d.a. and make make it very clear what the government can do and what it appears to be because right now there's a sword of damocles hanging over all journalists all activists in effect all citizens of this country and that was karl mayor attorney for the mayor longer of. the storm is brewing over the recent purchase of a prison by the u.s. government the president thomson illinois and the state made the sale to the federal bureau of prisons for one hundred sixty five million dollars so here's what's causing concern for some several lawmakers and groups are concerned it will

eventually be used to house inmates from one town i'm obey right now there are more than one hundred sixty inmates at guantanamo bay and several lawmakers say it was quote a backdoor move to import terrorists from guantanamo of going to animal bay into the united states the facility itself was built back in two thousand and one as a maximum security prison it's got sixteen hundred beds but has largely gone and used both you have obama administration and attorney general eric holder say it would not be used for get more detainees and it pointed out numerous times that moving inmates from get mo to the u.s. is barred by federal law still it is seen as a historic move and i spoke more about this earlier with politico's white house correspondent john king. well it's not a crazy idea because it was in fact the obama administration's idea the white house's idea a couple of years ago that they were going to move a lot of the detainees from guantanamo bay to this prison in illinois the ones that

were going to be hilden indefinite detention perhaps about sixty of them and the idea was part of the prison would be used for that and part of it would be used for ordinary run of the mill federal criminal inmates so it was an administration proposal the only thing that's a little surprising about hearing it brought up now is that the administration gave up on this a couple years ago and actually agreed to write into law provisions that make it illegal to move prisoners from guantanamo to anywhere in the u.s. mainland yeah i think one of the provisions is actually written in the national defense authorization act but this is interesting because i remember that you know back a couple years ago when this prison was slated to be this this to your home forget my detainees a lot of people in this country said we don't want them in this country we don't want them in our state but some illinois and i will take up this is maximum security i mean quite a few jobs no one else wants and this is a win win situation why is this not the case anymore well i mean i think in illinois it is still a popular thing to do indeed dick durbin the senator from illinois who was

a proponent of that idea bringing the guantanamo inmates there has turned out to be an even bigger proponent of simply placing the prison into federal government hands it's actually a pretty good deal for the federal government to buy that fully created and built prison as you said for one hundred sixty five million dollars attorney general holder said in a letter a few weeks ago that he thought it would cost four hundred million dollars to build a prison like this from scratch and plus they get the keys to it basically right away they don't have to sit there and try to devise how to build it and then go about the actual construction. so i know that recently attorney general holder wrote a letter to republican congressman frank wolf the chairman of the subcommittee on commerce justice science and related in agencies on appropriations chairman well has been very vocal in his opposition to this purchase and attorney general holder says you know they should actually have common ground on this matter why don't say

well there is this a strong perception i think among particularly republicans in congress though to be honest it's both among republicans and democrats that americans are strongly opposed to bringing these people debut as terrorists at guantanamo bay onto u.s. soil and frankly this is an issue where the republicans basically ran the table in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten completely pushed the president back on this you know all this legislation we talk about that's on the books it only got on the books because congress passed it and president obama signed it congress didn't somehow get it on the books by itself so the republicans felt they had the upper hand on this politically and i have to say i do think there's a certain element of politics in all the statements coming out yesterday given how remote the possibility is that you would actually ever see quinton m o inmates at this prison in illinois. i know josh we reported a few months ago the results of a study that showed that half of the detainee detainees they get now have actually been approved for release the problem is for example if they're from yemen it's not

that safe to send them back there i guess let me get your take about the larger guantanamo bay problem here. well i mean the president's policy has pretty much stalled out he made one speech in favor of it back in may of two thousand and nine and all the white house has basically done in public to make the case for their policy view since then is refer back to that speech the president hasn't invested any of his political capital in it so it basically stalled out completely and you do have people on both the right and the left questioning whether the idea of closing guantanamo and moving guantanamo to the u.s. really makes a lot of sense if jackson is the techniques that were used to quinton him or enhanced interrogations of people call them that's one thing but if the objection really is to holding people indefinitely as prisoners of war it's not entirely clear why when tommo is the problem you would just have thompson become as people said at the time going to pneumonia north and the protest would probably continue.

one of the things that we've talked about here in r.t. quite a bit is you know we replay those sound bites from president obama he said it on sixty minutes he said it numerous times on the campaign trail that he intends to close guantanamo bay this is one of his campaign promises i would like to ask people who've done any reporting on this at all you know what what is your take why do you think. this is not a campaign promise being made by the president four years later well it's still in the democratic party platform that it should be closed but it really wasn't mentioned by anybody at the democratic convention i think he's basically given up on the issue it is something that the president in theory still favors but the question isn't just whether he favors it in theory but how much capital is willing to put behind it and pretty much every time the white house has had to decide between investing time and effort and the president's public persona in closing guantanamo and any other issue any other issue seems to have won out and that's basically my view about why he's never managed to get any traction on that yes

certainly a multilevel story here both with lawmakers just sort of feeling like they are we supposed to have our you know stamp of approval on this as well the politics of it the foreign policy aspect of it certainly something very interesting that we plan to keep our eyes on josh gerstein white house reporter for politico thanks so much thank you. well the day has come for president obama and governor mitt romney to take the stage and debate their stances but with the nonstop campaign coverage and media blitz at this point we already know for the most part where the candidates stand on many of the issues and we're guessing that some of the most important domestic issues will barely get a mention tonight are to correspondent was wall takes a look at the top five topics the presidential debate won't cover. the much anticipated first u.s. presidential debate finally kicks off but chances are there won't be too many surprises at this point we know where both candidates stand on the issues that have

been in the forefront of the news cycles interestingly enough there are some critical and pressing topics the incumbent and his challenger won't talk about and we've compiled a list of the top five first off poverty a problem that has reached record levels in america and the numbers say it all take a look at these stats recently released by the u.s. census bureau fifteen percent of the u.s. population is considered poor that's forty six million americans one in five children living below the poverty line the income inequality gap is historically wide in the u.s. and only growing another issue that probably won't be discussed is the revolving door between wall street in washington former lobbyist and now convicted felon jack abramoff recently spoke about the systematic corruption on our t.v. here is what he says needs to change i'd like to shut the revolving door between public service and cashing in in the influence industry lobbying or advising whatever one calls at the moment but every law but the congress passes should be

applied to it so such as we see with the problem of insider trading where they can void use insider information to make money in the row so those shouldn't. the number three on our list the ever expanding use of surveillance and we've talked about trap wire an elaborate intelligence infrastructure that uses state of the art surveillance systems we're talking facial recognition point until camera. traffic cameras and vast databases all working together to track suspicious persons there's still a lot we don't know about much of this system was exposed on wiki leaks and beyond cameras the winding down of the wars means these unmanned aircraft you see behind me could be hovering in the sky near you well next up on our last military spending by an issue ron paul brought to the forefront time and time again i wouldn't wait for my journals i'm the commander in chief i make the decisions i told the generals what to do and i bring them home as quickly as possible and

a good amount of iraq as well and i wouldn't start a war in libya i'd quit bombing yemen and i'd quit bombing pakistan and start taking care of people here at home because we could save hundreds of billions of dollars our national security is not buying our prisons over there. but we don't expect president obama nor governor romney to talk much about it and last but not least the national defense authorization act or. it was signed into law by president obama on new year's eve a controversial provision allows the government to detain american citizens indefinitely a group of journalists and activists say that the government over fear that they could be indefinitely detained under the law because their jobs sometimes require them to communicate with terrorists chris hedges is one of the plaintiffs here he is speaking to r.t. about the dangers of this law. it removes due process for anybody who is deemed not much just a terrorist but to have contact with these associated forces that's not

a term that's defined it's nebulous it's quite a frightening piece of legislation i had was in the other plaintiffs had some victories in blocking the controversial provision that allows for indefinite detention but on tuesday the u.s. court of appeals for the second circuit extended indefinite detention powers so there you have it the top five topics that likely won't be discussed in the first presidential debate but who knows maybe it'll surprise us but i wouldn't put my money on it in washington liz wahl r.t. . well that's going to do it for us for now but if you missed any part of today's show zero luck we posed all of our interviews online in full so just go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america and there you can click comment even forward the videos to your friends also for the very latest information on the stories we covered in a few we didn't even have time to get to go to our website our team dot com slash usa you can.